A systematic review of operational research modelling for alcohol consumption and its consequences

Williams, Elin H., Harper, Paul R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7894-4907, Palmer, Geraint I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7865-6964 and Gartner, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4361-8559 2025. A systematic review of operational research modelling for alcohol consumption and its consequences. Health Systems , pp. 1-36. 10.1080/20476965.2025.2523751

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Abstract

Recent research has revealed how operational research (OR) models and methods have been successfully applied to model alcohol consumption and its consequences (ACC). However, to date, there is no systematic review of OR methods to model ACC that can provide a broad overview of the utilisation of OR methods in this field. In this paper, we contribute to the OR literature as follows. Firstly, we provide a structured taxonomy which helps categorising the literature. Secondly, we conduct a systematic and reproducible search to identify publications that have utilised OR methods to model ACC. Thirdly, we categorise the relevant publications using the taxonomy and provide a dataset of the classification. Our findings highlight that recent research has focused on modelling consumption behaviours, particularly by utilising graph and network methods. Moreover, previous research has been predominantly led by the social sciences and public health fields and less so by the OR domain. Our results reveal gaps in the literature, including limited whole systems modelling and scarce interdisciplinary collaboration across research domains. The development of a future research agenda using our taxonomy and literature review may help closing these gaps and, ultimately, improve planning decisions to improve health, social care, and crime systems.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Mathematics
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2025-08-03
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	2047-6965
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 August 2025
Last Modified:	18 Aug 2025 14:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180510

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